This Land Is … whose land?: The history of Woody Guthrie’s song

January 26, 2021 News 3 Views

A number of minutes into US President Joe Biden’s inauguration ceremony, on the heels of an impassioned rendition of The Star Spangled Banner by her fellow pop famous person Girl Gaga, Jennifer Lopez stepped as much as the rostrum and commenced singing lyrics many Individuals be taught in faculties and church buildings:

This land is your land

This land is my land

From California to the New York island

From the Redwood forest to the Gulf Stream water

This land was made for you and me

Few songs apart from Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land, it might appear, may higher embody the theme of “unity” with which President-elect Biden had been trying to dissipate the local weather of bullying and cruelty cultivated by the Trump administration.

However all through Wednesday afternoon and the times that adopted, a gradual stream of social media posts criticised using the tune, with its obvious disregard for the truth that it solely grew to become potential to name this land yours and mine due to acts of violence in opposition to its earlier occupants, the Indigenous folks of what we now name North America.

That Guthrie is an icon of the US left, a person well-known for songs calling for justice for the disempowered and exploited, carried no forex; “The inauguration started by JLO singing a tune celebrating stolen land and Indigenous genocide,” wrote Decrease Brule Sioux historian Nick Estes on Twitter, the place the tune was additionally known as a “settler anthem” and “the epitome of Indigenous erasure”.

I spent the previous seven years researching and writing Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life, a biography specializing in how the singer lived as a son, lover, father, psychiatric affected person, and disabled particular person whereas sustaining his staunch leftist ideas within the more and more reactionary environment of the post-war US. In my deep analysis into his personal papers, I discovered an excellent, difficult and flawed human being whose battle to know each his private world and his place in historical past made me admire him extra deeply than earlier than I started the mission.

That stated, I agree with the critics. His most well-known tune erases the true historical past of this continent, the basic violence and brutality of settler colonialism that made it potential for folks of European ancestry to dwell right here – details that many white residents of the US, throughout the political spectrum, would favor to not take into account. Within the type through which most individuals encounter it, This Land Is Your Land replaces this particular previous with an idealist fantasy of the “land” as an harmless place whose expanse and diverse landscapes mirror Individuals’ superb capability to return collectively throughout our variations.

The very fact is, although, that Woody Guthrie would have despised any use of the tune as a feel-good, ahistorical name for unity. Initially written in 1940 as a retort to Irving Berlin’s jingoistic God Bless America, Guthrie’s tune is a scathing condemnation of the very concept that land might be owned, handled as property. In a hardly ever aired verse of the unique lyrics, an indication studying “personal property” interrupts the wandering minstrel’s cross-continental stroll. However the disturbance is simply momentary, for the singer rapidly notes that “on the opposite aspect, it didn’t say nothing/That aspect was made for you and me”. And, in one other little-known verse, the singer witnesses ravenous folks lined up at a soup kitchen, main him to shift the chorus to a query: “Is that this land made for you and me?” Notably, at an occasion celebrating Barack Obama’s first inauguration, former Guthrie colleague Pete Seeger and Guthrie inheritor Bruce Springsteen included these verses of their efficiency of the tune.

In truth, after you have learn the tune’s lyrics of their entirety, the title phrase sheds all quasi-Kumbaya resonances and turns into what Guthrie meant it to be: a defiant, deeply radical assertion of opposition to capitalist exploitation. The tune’s phrases are essential and fierce, not cosy and reassuring: This land is your land, it declares to its listeners, not the land of the individuals who, based on market logic, personal it, maintain the deeds to it, exploit it for revenue. Land just isn’t a commodity. These deeds are fictions, and the homeowners are, primarily, thieves.

Nonetheless, even this expanded – some would say correct – account of the tune’s politics doesn’t refute the claims of Indigenous folks and their allies. Even when the tune’s supposed message rejects the predations of capitalism and the possession of land – which by the way brings it nearer according to many Indigenous cultures’ understanding of individuals’s relationship to the land on which they dwell – even when, as I hear the tune, it isn’t nationalist and even patriotic, This Land Is Your Land nonetheless neglects to say the historical past that made the collectivist stroll it narrates potential for folks of European descent, and that may be a massive downside, maybe particularly within the work of an artist dedicated to social justice.

Because the Abenaki author and musician Mali Obomsawin put it in a trenchant 2019 essay on the tune’s implications for Indigenous folks: “By critiquing ‘This Land Is Your Land,’ I don’t imply to suggest that Guthrie himself promoted conquest, however the tune is indicative of American leftists’ position in Native invisibility. The lyrics as they’re embraced as we speak evoke Manifest Future and expansionism … When sung as a political act, the gathering or demonstration is infused with anti-Nativism and reinforces the blind spot. Furthermore, my critique is aimed on the nation-state of America, which teaches ignorances about American historical past so strong and deep-seated that even our society’s most inclusion-oriented activists battle to transcend them.”

Key right here is the notion of the “blind spot”. The tune affirms what the scholar Mark Rifkin calls “settler frequent sense”: the privilege of these of us descended from settlers to look away, to neglect each this historical past and the very a lot current and persevering with lives of Indigenous folks on this continent, and to nonetheless be taken severely as an mental, politician, or social justice activist. As Obomsawin notes, this tendency runs by means of every part from cheering for skilled sports activities franchises with names like “Indians” to calling the US a “nation of immigrants”.

A part of the purpose Obomsawin and Rifkin are making is that almost all white and different non-Indigenous folks don’t actively determine to disregard this a part of historical past. Quite, as ignorance is handed down by means of the generations, sources that might unsettle it are merely not available, even within the school rooms of well-meaning educators and in makes an attempt to heal a broken nation just like the Inauguration ceremony. And this shortage of sources is reaffirmed when a tune like This Land Is Your Land is sung, particularly in its deformed, defanged model. Because of this, as Obomsawin writes: “Ignorance is passively consumed and passively reproduced, cinching Native invisibility.”

For what it’s price, nevertheless, Guthrie was somebody who, all through his life, sought to counter the myopia of his training and upbringing – together with his privileges as a white particular person. His father, a civic chief within the city of Okemah, Oklahoma, was a self-proclaimed white supremacist, suspected to have taken half within the lynching of Laura Nelson, a Black lady, and her teenaged son L D the yr earlier than Woody was born. Racism was merely a given amongst white folks in Oklahoma, which, earlier than turning into a state in 1907, had been the ultimate vacation spot for Indigenous nations forcibly displaced from the Deep South, and which, after the collapse of Reconstruction, noticed a big inflow of African Individuals hoping to discovered a Black homeland in its territory. Atrocities just like the Nelson lynching have been a direct response to those ambitions and to the vitality of the various all-Black cities that lasted into statehood.

Within the early years of his skilled profession, within the late 1930s, Guthrie sang a minimum of one racist tune on the radio and drew anti-Black caricatures in his notebooks, at the same time as he concurrently wrote songs in help of mud bowl refugees and migrant staff. However as he discovered extra in regards to the insidious methods energy operates throughout race and sophistication, collaborated with Black musicians, and have become extra conversant in the work of Black artists and activists, his views shifted drastically. Within the early 1940s, he wrote a seven-minute tune about Harriet Tubman, praising the fugitive chief for instigating organised, militant, armed resistance to slaveholders. In 1949, he was among the many viewers members of a Paul Robeson concert attacked by a racist mob as police seemed the opposite approach and, in some circumstances, directed concertgoers towards gauntlets of stone-throwers. He devoured the screed that Robeson and different Black radicals introduced to the United Nations in 1951, We Cost Genocide, which known as police brutality in opposition to African Individuals a state-sponsored type of lynching. Certainly, he wrote songs primarily based on a number of the particular circumstances of police violence in opposition to Black women and men documented in its appendices.

Guthrie’s private papers and a few printed materials present that he held related emotions of solidarity with Indigenous folks. He may sometimes lapse into romanticism, as when he recalled witnessing the singing and dancing of individuals from the Creek Nation as a baby. However in stage patter from certainly one of his few recorded concert events, he additionally explicitly lamented how his displaced Indigenous neighbours in Oklahoma have been assigned land believed to be poor in sources of worth, solely to be “cheated” out of it, “or worse”, upon the invention of oil. At one level, making notes for a mission a few collection of radical martyrs, he deliberate to write down a ballad about Mangas Coloradas, the 19th-century Apache tribal chief well-known for his particularly forceful, even lethal resistance to white settlement within the Southwest. He had clearly been paying consideration, by means of studying or dialog with extra enlightened comrades or each. Consequently, he was capable of dislodge most of the typical assumptions making up the slippery white supremacy embedded in settler frequent sense.

I ought to word that the social media postings of Inauguration Day have been removed from the primary eruption of criticism of This Land Is Your Land by Indigenous folks; they mirror a decades-long critique. The non-Indigenous, particularly white Individuals, ought to pay attention to those voices intently. We should always recognise how the tune’s phrases sound to many Native Individuals, and act accordingly – whether or not meaning singing it with a prefatory remark, singing the suppressed verses, not singing it in any respect, or another artistic and empathic possibility.

We should always not let our sentimental attachments to the tune trigger us to strike a defensive pose. A person who routinely acknowledged his flaws and limitations all through his comparatively transient life, Guthrie tried to see the world in ways in which challenged conference, that questioned the accepted, frequent sense of issues, and that took no hierarchy with no consideration. Indigenous critiques of the tune’s erasures are very important to the pursuit of justice for all, and proof means that Guthrie himself would have agreed.